I live in a house with three people who pee standing up, and I am convinced that being forced to look at male genitalia every day for the length and breadth of your life inhibits your ability to notice other things. I think this is a safety mechanism built into the human male brain, because the best practical joke God ever pulled really was making something so useful and generally pleasant to be around so totally fucking strangepork bizarro-looking.

This is why I seldom if ever get upset when they don't notice my new haircuts.

Maybe they just can't see in sepia, I dunno.

They way I see it, they can't see things because all that weiner all the time has blinded them slightly. You know how they say new mothers get dumb so their brains can focus on the babies? I think boys get blind so they can deal with being forced to look at dinglehoppers for the rest of their lives. And since I made 2/3 of those franks-n-beans, I can't really complain that they don't notice that I dropped five pounds or got a $300 haircut that looks exactly like the old one (and actually, I'm pretty thankful one of them didn't notice that).

One of them will be a teenager in 10 weeks and one of them is in the throws of tweendome and one of them has been contractually bound to me for the better part of 16 years so at this point, their job is to look through me until they want something anyway, and when they DO want something, it's rarely every from my face. Well, not from 2/3 of them.

And this is why I had a daughter.

Because for as long as I've had her, I've had red, plastic, cat-eyeish glasses. I've had only two pairs, and if you could tell the difference in them, you were too close.

I got new glasses last week.

When my husband saw me that night, he was like, "::cocks head to side:: hmmm ::grins, kisses my forehead::" which is man for, "I'm supposed to notice something here but I just went pee and everything's kind of a blur; please don't hurt me".

My sons came home from school and elbow-checked me on their way to eat everything that wasn't stapled down and have been screaming something about kill all the aliens die die until you're dead die into the headset of the XBox360 since. They have yet to look at me above the oven mitts.

But my daughter? I picked up her up from school that afternoon and before she even left her classroom, I saw her pointing and shouting through the window of her class door, "MOMMA, YOU LOOK SO BOOOTIFUL IN YOUR NEW GWASSES!" Because girls notice these things. Because we pee sitting down like civilized human beings who want to play dress up with whatever the last thing you replaced was.